Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy

The back cover calls this "rich, accessible and provocative". I would disagree with the accessible part. This is a dense book, and at times it reads like a literature survey, which breaks the flow and distracts the average reader. Another thing that distracts is the unnecessary intermingling polarizing politics which distract from the core issue.And the core issue is very important and will become more so as time goes by. The crowd fleecing happens in varying degrees, everything we do online is a useful data point for the big companies (otherwise they wouldn't be tracking and saving everything). Under which circumstances, how, and how much we should be compensated is a difficult problem to be solved. As things are now, the funnel hoovers most of the cash to the few platform owners, so they are not in a particular hurry to change things. Facebook has not offered anyone profit sharing from all the advertising revenue they make from each individual person's life/social graph..Some of the ideas offered are practical and they already have a proof of concept, where the platforms and the ecosystems are co-owned by the participants, instead of the more common trickle down of services like Uber and Doordash and many others.The book can at times go in the hyperbolic and the melodramatic (eg the last paragraph in the Acknowledgments), and reliving of the Cold War economic politics can turn off large swaths of people, or at least give them an excuse to dismiss the topic at large.Having said that, if you filter out the above, this book is loaded with relevant material, and can be a valuable resource for anyone interesting in the topic in a more in-depth fashion.

Very good read- I couldn't put it down. Very informative.

I was quite interested to hear what this book had to say, as I've been fairly fascinated with the rise of the digital economy, especially crowd work sites like mTurk. I was looking forward to a review of the various types of digital work available, and an analysis of how they affected workers and the economy and society in general. However, what I found was basically a mess.The author certainly has a strong point of view about work such as on mTurk and Uber---he feels it exploits workers. He's clear about that, but far less clear about why this is the case. The main point that he pounds out over and over is that many workers don't make a living wage, or the minimum wage, and that they are treated as contractors, not employees. Nothing takes him off this view, not even quotes and statistics showing that many workers are quite satisfied with their pay and work freedom.However, the main reason this book failed for me is the writing. It reads like a term paper that has a minimum word requirement---a huge amount of the writing feels like filler. The author will talk about what's going to say for pages, say a bit about it, and then write for pages about what he just said. There is very little content that is not just his own reflections and conclusions. He also is quite poor at explaining even what a digital workplace is. For example, the section he's set up for pages to be about what mTurk is doesn't even get through a full paragraph of explanation without diverging into an attack on mTurk---"the operation staff appears to be overwhelmed and burnt out" If you didn't already know what mTurk looked like, you would not get much of a clue here.There is also a strange and huge use of semi-colons throughout the book, including several sentences I found with more than one in a sentence---something I've never seen before in a published book! (and the edition I read is not a pre-publication review edition, but the actual book)I found several areas where either the author doesn't seem current on his knowledge or he seems to have a lack of historical background for what he's saying. For example, he speaks of Harriet Klausner, the well-known Amazon reviewer, in the present tense, although she had died at the time of this book's writing, and he mentions Henry Ford with the tone of seeing him as an example of how to treat workers, seeming unaware of Ford's quite checkered reputation in that area.I think the topic of this book is one that very much needs to be explored, and the author has a passion for his beliefs, but I have to say the organization and writing of this book are not such that he gets his point across with much success.

Trebor Scholz' "Uberworked and Underpaid" describes a very real problem in the modern economy that you are unaware of unless you work as a digital part-timer. Simply put, many of the dotcom or app-based organizations that receive raves on business-oriented websites rely heavily on a part-time, freelance workforce. They cloak the secrets to their profitability within language that sounds utopian, as if their businesses were a cross between Creative Commons and Goodwill organizations. But dig deeper, and its obvious that many of these opportunities are dead-ends for the worker. The solution (to Dr. Scholz at least) is the creation of some type of industry-specific creative cooperative.It's too bad that all of this is embedded within one of the most rambling, poorly-organized, academic pontificating that you could ask for. There are so many missed opportunities, such as:1. Tech companies that use consumer-generated feedback and advice on User Forums as a surrogate for writing coherent manuals or providing competent tech support.2. PR firms that manipulate the visibility of certain news stories (press releases, really) by feeding them to seemingly independent blogs that actually cut-and-paste many of their reviews.3. Test prep companies that outsource much of their item creation to subcontractors in the Near East with minimal quality control..4. News agencies that encourage amateur photographers to send in their photos of newsworthy events, for the sole pleasure of hearing your name mentioned on the air rather than being paid for use of your photos.5. The widespread use of user-written commentary on news articles to help pad out the fresh content that a paid site offers.And so on.Instead, Dr. Scholz confuses the issue by repeatedly going back to horror stories about the manufacture of physical tech products in China and how so many AOL chat room moderators felt burned back in the 1990s when they weren't hired as employees. I actually agree with much of Scholz' thesis, but the examples are often terrible and the editing is severely lacking. I believe this book can be a useful start for a graduate student working on a thesis - but despite its catchy title this is not something that's going to provide enlightening reading in is current form for anyone who is familiar with contemporary cyberculture.

the book shows all the main problems related to platform capitalism and the sharing economy. The author adopts an interdisciplinary methodology to deal with a very liquid object of research, that is quickly changing. I would say that that book must be read by anyone who wants to understand critical elements of capitalism based on new technologies and sharing platforms. The book provides also some solutions to the problems that are illustrated. Perhaps the most important book on the sharing economy.